Padre handed Aleph the spherical pod. Aleph examined it, turned it in his fingers. It was cream-colored, about the size of a golf ball, and soft like a marshmallow. He squeezed the pod between his thumb and forefinger until the fingers were nearly touching one another at the center of it.

The pod bulged at the sides, but even under the pressure of whitened knuckles, didn’t burst or tear. When Aleph let go, the pod gradually returned to its exact previous shape: without so much as a dimple where he had pressed.

“A miracle,” said Padre.

“What’s so amazing about a stress ball?” said Aleph, handing the pod back.

Padre took the pod and held it up before his eyes. “Every known material,” he said, “eventually shows signs of wear. But this sphere… it never ages. I’ve cut it, crushed it, hidden pieces of it from itself… but the result is always the same. It returns to this precise configuration, each molecule crawling back to exactly the place it started. Almost as if its inception was a moment marked in time that it always travels back to.”

Aleph stared at Padre during his monologue without hearing him. For some reason, he was reminded of a hot summer’s afternoon years prior when he’d watched an ape at the zoo sit and scratch its nuggets for a solid seven minutes. He snapped out of it. “What’s your point, father?”

Padre lowered the pod and looked back to Aleph. Aleph could practically see the bobbing circle of a flashlight scanning the inner walls of Padre’s skull though his widened, glassy pupils, searching for something, anything. But the party came back emptyhanded. “I don’t know,” said Padre.

And it’s true. He didn’t.

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